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Agencies converge to meet with NW Missouri farmers

The Missouri Farm Service Agency has held two days of meetings in Northwest Missouri with federal and state agency folks to help farmers get questions answered about flood recovery.

 Meetings were in Atchison and Holt counties, with farmers from Buchanan and Andrew counties also in attendance.

Director Brent Hampy says a lot of them are concerned about eligibility to get debris cleared from their lands. In addition to an FSA and an NRCS program for that, he says, the state wants to pitch in, “Governor Parson and Director Chinn were wanting to make sure that anybody that fell through the cracks on needing assistance in between those two programs, the Missouri Department of Ag was going to look and see if they could accomplish any of those needs as well.”

Farmers in Atchison and Holt Counties in Missouri are eligible for low interest loans under the presidential disaster declaration for Nebraska. Two other disaster requests would cover production and physical losses, “So production loss is basically growing crops or agricultural production. And, physical loss can be facilities. It can also be stored grain. It covers a lot of things.”

Hampy encourages farmers to sign up for the Emergency Conservation Program through their FSA offices, even if their lands are still flooded. Damage assessments on their farms will be done once the waters go down.

Hampy says there is definitely stress for farmers, “You can certainly sense there’s a lot of stress for some producers, you know, maybe new producers. People that haven’t been flooded before so badly now realize their land is impacted because levee breaks occur in different places. So, lands that weren’t terribly impacted in the 2011 flood may be severely impacted now.”